New Tourism Minister Prefers Quality To Quantity

[george]

New tourism minister prefers quality to quantity, seeks TAT head

BANGKOK: -- Thailand's newly appointed tourism and sports minister said Wednesday he would target the quality of tourists, not their quantity, as there was a need to protect the natural environment.

Suwit Yodmanee spoke to reporters regarding his proposed work strategies, saying he welcomed suggestions from related government agencies to develop the country's tourism as well as to solve problems.

The new minister promised to continue ongoing tourism promotion programmes such as Thailand Elite, Long Stay and Thailand Riviera, which he praised as 'very good schemes'.

However, the minister dismissed speculation on dividing tourism functions from sports in separate ministries, saying there was no urgent need to do this during the interim government.

The most urgent task, he said, is to get a new governor for the Tourism Authority of Thailand.

''We must get it done as quickly as possible. The selection process shouldn't take longer than three months,'' he said, promising equal treatment for both internal and external candidates.

''I know that there are some internal candidates who are qualified,'' he said.

As for the coming fiscal year's budget, the minister said he would negotiate with the Bureau of Budget the best he could,as the bureau has criticised the ministry for proposing a figure that was too large.

''We must negotiate for the best figure to fund our task," Mr. Suwit said. "I expect the budget to be available early next year,''.

--TNA 2006-10-11

[Unknown]

Reminds me of the Elite Card...

[griffer]

"Thailand Elite" I know....but "Long Stay" and "Riviera"....anyone heard of these?

[John K]

Other than the changes dealing with corruption, it looks like we are in for a volley of not to well thought out ideas.

[Rooo]

"Thailand Elite" I know....but "Long Stay" and "Riviera"....anyone heard of these?

http://www.guidetothailand.com/thailand-tr...on/longstay.htm

[Thailand]

New immigration requirements:

Jeans & T shirts this line, suits and ties this line !

[yoshiwara]

re quality vs quantity will we see a strip-down at the passport counter for a check re bad taste tattoos, waistlines over a certain figure and awful haircuts? I think we ought to know!

[kmart]

Other than the changes dealing with corruption, it looks like we are in for a volley of not to well thought out ideas.

Some things never change, eh?

[Crossy]

re quality vs quantity will we see a strip-down at the passport counter for a check re bad taste tattoos, waistlines over a certain figure and awful haircuts? I think we ought to know!

A town in Italy actually tried this once

Senator Andrea Guglieri, the mayor of Diano Marina, a small family resort west of Genoa, and his council drew up a plan in 2000 to ban fat and ugly women from walking around in two-piece costumes. Traffic wardens were to be entrusted with the task of stopping and examining women to ensure that they passed eight out of ten requirements, ranging from the size of their bust to the firmness of their buttocks. New applicants flooded the predominantly male traffic warden force, and sexual harassment suits were expected to follow.

Signor Guglieri also said there was no reason why bare-torsoed men sporting tight or daringly cut trunks should not be made to pass a similar set of requirements. A local newspaper cast aspersions on Signore Guglieri's own looks - and called for all ugly mayors to be sacked!

[naka]

Same old blinkered xenophobic dribble.

When will these people learn that they will not get the type of tourists they crave

(whatever they are) until they supply the quality places and quality infrastructure

that is required to lure these people.

Let's be honest, Thailand is an unkempt, dirty country with ramshackle infrastructure.

No amount of wishful thinking is ever going to turn any place in Thailand into the Riviera.

Naka.

[Insight]

Same old blinkered xenophobic dribble.

When will these people learn that they will not get the type of tourists they crave

(whatever they are) until they supply the quality places and quality infrastructure

that is required to lure these people.

Let's be honest, Thailand is an unkempt, dirty country with ramshackle infrastructure.

No amount of wishful thinking is ever going to turn any place in Thailand into the Riviera.

Naka.

Hear hear... Another dose of (misplaced) pride before practicality.

[The Coder]

not their quantity, as there was a need to protect the natural environment.

Interesting because this is a new reason! Before the reason cited was financially motivated. Trying to protect the "natural environment" by stabilizing the number of tourists isn't going to make it come back as it is pretty ruined already. They need to study popular tourist spots *outside* of Thailand that are not ruined environmentally, learn from it, and apply it. The old "blame every environmental problem on the tourists and do nothing ourselves" attitude is really sad here.

Edited October 12, 2006 by The Coder

[fxm88]

New immigration requirements:

Jeans & T shirts this line, suits and ties this line, Hippy appearance back on the plane.

[OlRedEyes]

Same old blinkered xenophobic dribble.

When will these people learn that they will not get the type of tourists they crave

(whatever they are) until they supply the quality places and quality infrastructure

that is required to lure these people.

Let's be honest, Thailand is an unkempt, dirty country with ramshackle infrastructure.

No amount of wishful thinking is ever going to turn any place in Thailand into the Riviera.

Naka.

Hear hear... Another dose of (misplaced) pride before practicality.

Amen.

Different day, different faces, same pie-in-the-sky.

[Tolley]

It won't be long the way things are going before there is a verifiable financial requirement to enter Thailand. ie You must spend 1000 US a week if you want to come here.

What a joke!

[Steph1012]

The Rivera? It is very similar to Thailand apart from:

There are regular bus services along the entire tourist route (exactly not like the one the mafia have banned on Phuket), and when you get on a bus it takes you to where it says on the bus, not to a bunch of taxi drivers at a coffee stand who tell you every hotel you ever heard of is closed. The airport taxis do just this as well even with high paying tourists. They stop at a travel shop en-route which their boss owns.

The traffic lights are sequenced so you only ever hit one red one on a major route unless you are breaking the speed limit. If you have an accident the Police turn up and make a report based on the circumstances, not the nationality of the drivers, or if there is a falang in the car! Anybody driving the wrong way on a motor way would be banged up until trial and definately lose their licence and receive a very heavy fine. If they caused an accident you could expect jail time and big compensation payments on top.

When you order a meal it comes, not what they remember with the rest coming after you reminded them. Its complete and in the right order. Not ice cream first as it takes less time to prepare than the main course and the starter. When you eat in a restaurant there, a procession of hawkers and camera jockeys with monkeys and eagles do not repeatedly tug on your arm.

You can enter the country anytime and stay as long as you like as we are in the EU now, not heading backwards down the visa issuing route. Many of us over winter on the Riviera and we are not bussed out of the country every 90 days and required to conform to every changing rules.

Their are tractor drawn beach cleaning machines on every beach between Marseilles and Piza, Italy that I visited.

You can walk, cycle, jog and roller skate on the footpaths and the prom without being pressured to buy suits, have massages, buy fake watches, lighters, flowers, trikets and bling. There are many major cycle routes along most a roads.

On balance though the French are a surly lot and wouldn't swap Thailand for there. But that is because my expectations are lowered when I live here. Rich people do not lower their expectations if they are paying top dollar.

Service though is more than smiling and apologising for all the things that have been forgotten, mislaid and broken. When you are dealing with "Quality Tourists" it's about forward planning, concentration and application to the job at hand, just has doesn't happen in thailand. I expect this and don't really mind, but I hear many tourists at higher end resorts going off the rails about these things.

Since the last push for quality though we have picked up the Russian and chinese high density family package tour market as far as I can see. And from what I saw on the BBC travel program, most of them came to see Katoey shows.!! The money and the commission stays in their home countries and because they come a bus load at a time they rachet the price down massively so only the agents make anything. The poor Thai workers and operators are flat out and get nothing.

I love Thailand and the Thais, but at management and organisation level, they are never going to compete seriously for the Quality end. Some will come for the beaches and to be off the beaten track but we are 20 years of infastructure development behind anywhere on the Riviera.

I need a coffee!

Edited October 12, 2006 by Steph1012

[Steph1012]

"Thailand Elite" I know....but "Long Stay" and "Riviera"....anyone heard of these?

http://www.guidetothailand.com/thailand-tr...on/longstay.htm

They started advertising this heavily on Pattaya People TV around the same time as the last batch of visa rules broke out. Connected?

[Firefan]

What the heck is the "Riviera" program? Only heard of Longstay and Thai Elite.

I googled it and it turns out to be a biodome somewhere

Cheers!

Edited October 12, 2006 by Firefan

[steveromagnino]

I am strangely enough well familiar with this 'new approach'.

It isn't that tough to understand.

Blind stubborness to drive the number of total tourist arrivals to 20m and beyond has done the country no favours.

Quality over quantity means reducing subsidies to get low end package tourists in, and to stop saying we are going to have 25m or more tourists coming in each year.

Better to have 10m, and actually work on the infrastructure needed to deliver a decent experience to those 10m, than just blindly go for volume, when much of the volume that the previous administration were crowing about were simply people flying in, staying at some chain hotel, not spending much and crowding up and destroying scenic attractions which are a finite resource the way they are being treated at the moment.

If any of you have had the displeasure to deal with the TAT, you would be well aware of, I think OldAsiaHand described the governor as Miss 20%, the level of corruption and unfairness in how things have been done.

The amount of money wasted on pointless TAT campaigns in the last 5 years simply to drive 'volume' has been unbelieveable, and sets new standards in blandness.

I am not sure how many of you are actually staying at the Amanpuri or other high end places; there are some of the elements necessary to develop a high end experience here but many of the basic elements (some of which Steph has touched on) are missing or broken.

I like the approach of trying to fix them rather than jsut covering them up with vast numbers of low end tourists.

[Steph1012]

Better to have 10m, and actually work on the infrastructure needed to deliver a decent experience to those 10m, than just blindly go for volume, when much of the volume that the previous administration were crowing about were simply people flying in, staying at some chain hotel, not spending much and crowding up and destroying scenic attractions which are a finite resource the way they are being treated at the moment.

Nice point.

This is the way to go. I may have been a bit rash and sarcastic in my last post Can I apoliogise and state that I love the "poor" service and derive much amusement from it. (had my coffee now!)

For the "quality end" more money needs to find its way from the corruption pot into the re-development pot.

Lets hope for a better TAT out of this.

Edited October 12, 2006 by Steph1012

[OlRedEyes]

I am not sure how many of you are actually staying at the Amanpuri or other high end places; there are some of the elements necessary to develop a high end experience here but many of the basic elements (some of which Steph has touched on) are missing or broken.

I like the approach of trying to fix them rather than jsut covering them up with vast numbers of low end tourists.

I'd like to see them 'fix' the corruption and lack of a concept of quality that leads to fast decaying infrastructure, the sad level of service, or the general state of the cities and beaches. They'd have to change the populations culture first, because all these are rooted there. Hel_l, they'd have to change their own culture first, and that seems impossible.

'Quality' in Thailand equates to price, not the inherent quality of the product. It's a mentality that will not change soon. Quality tourists means rich tourists, quality facilities and service means expensive facilities or service. 'Better level' does not come into it. This is normally achieved in their mind by adding a few cheap trinkets in the decor.

They don't understand their market, simple. Doubt whether they will anytime soon. That said, I'd absolutely love to see less tourists here if I were selfish, but it's the regular Thai who's going to suffer.

I wish them well with all my heart. I just wish they'd grow up.

Edited October 12, 2006 by OlRedEyes

[ding]

We'll see. If a dollar is to be made they will be fools to desuade it.

Tourism is an environmentaly CLEAN income earner. Look at the toxic sludge, air, and water produced when a nation manufactures goods. If they replace the lost margin of tourism income with production they will see that- "ENVIRONMENT" strawman argument -for the fallacy it is.

Edited October 12, 2006 by ding

[steveromagnino]

They don't understand their market, simple. Doubt whether they will anytime soon.

By 'they' I suppose you also mean 'me'

I understand my market fairly well, well enough that the multinationals I deal with specifically want to meet and have me tell them what is going on with tourist arrivals, shopper preference, share of wallet and the like.

I'll say this. As long as the total number of arrivals keeps climbing and there are beer drinkers and package tourists, the tourist operators can afford to offer a junk service and bad products. There are plenty more customers where that lot came from.

Roads can be bad. Reserves can be destroyed. Nature need not be pristine. Volume is where it is at.

This is an idiotic mentality. And one that has allowed the country to develop an unhealthy dependency on low end tourism and the associated skin trade. And there are tourists who stay for 10 years, work illegally, don't pay tax, and break laws. These are not quality tourists.

I can assure you there are operators like Rabbit Resort, Trisara, Amanpuri, Tonsai Bay, Oriental, etc that do not share this philosophy in the least.

A little hurt is needed for the greater good, much like getting rid of the outdoor beer bar slums of Skuhimvit Road and moving them somewhere a bit more discrete.

Step by step, but the decision to actually focus on anything other than just sheer volume is a good move in my book. There are THai operators that understand quality. In my mind, Gulliver is a quality offer compared to the beer bars outdoors. At any level, one star, two star and so on, quality is value for money, consistent delivery at level of expectation and no rip offs.

For tourism, sustainable quality and volume are almost diametrically opposed here in Thailand. Much to the ire of some posters, I cannot wait for the day that the places I enjoy visiting aren't crowded with rats&it <deleted> tourists surrounded by companions rented by the hour. And at that point, without massive growth year on year in sheer numbers, the operators Thai and foreign alike had BETTER get their offer right.

[Ricardo]

Thailand has its 5-star hotels/resorts, and hopefully they will continue to make money, but they are competing with an awful lot of other destinations, mentioning just the Caribbean or Maldives, who can offer a very good product.

For the package-holiday brigade, there are resorts like Pataya & Phuket, with lots of large medium-class hotels, which are ideal for those who don't want to have to organise themselves in a new-to-them country.

For the backpackers and budget long-stay tourists, there is Samui & a host of other islands, with the North-West for the jungle-experience & trecking.

So Thailand has it all !

And should be appropriately promoted to all of these markets.

[Old Man River]

Better to have 10m, and actually work on the infrastructure needed to deliver a decent experience to those 10m, than just blindly go for volume, when much of the volume that the previous administration were crowing about were simply people flying in, staying at some chain hotel, not spending much and crowding up and destroying scenic attractions which are a finite resource the way they are being treated at the moment.

Nice point.

This is the way to go. I may have been a bit rash and sarcastic in my last post Can I apoliogise and state that I love the "poor" service and derive much amusement from it. (had my coffee now!)

For the "quality end" more money needs to find its way from the corruption pot into the re-development pot.

Lets hope for a better TAT out of this.

Really, it will all depend on who ultimately gets chosen as Head of TAT, but Dr. Suvit was a good choice as minister. Dr. Suvit is well known to a number of us in Bangkok due to the large amount of charitable work he and his wife do. He is a doer and genuinely a good guy. When you have someone like this in a position to do a lot of good, good things normally happen.

[fxm88]

It won't be long the way things are going before there is a verifiable financial requirement to enter Thailand. ie You must spend 1000 US a week if you want to come here.

Thailand could revive Burma's scheme of making non-refundable FEC (Foreign Exchange Certificate) purchases mandatory upon arrival!

[vegas]

It's a bit sad that Thais/TAT look down on backpackers as they are the ones that popularised Thailand in the first place. That and the Vietnam war. Still, no other coutry in the region is going to take business from Thailand. Vietnam is still a mess, ditto Cambodia, Myanmar and the Philippines is full of terrorists and guns (according to the press).

Tourism Ministers are the same as any other Thai politician, or politician worldwide for that matter, they just say what they think the people want to hear.

[Tolley]

I don't want quality infrastructure when i come to Thailand.

I don't want Gullivers or 5 star hotels or masses of huge concrete shopping malls.

There is a market elsewhere for that and that is well Singapore or lots of European tourist destinations.

I like the outdoor beer bars, the food on the street ,the wrong orders, the chaotic roads ,the mai pen rai attitude etc

That is part of the reason i love Thailand. Take it away and what have you really got.

I feel supremely confident that things are not going to change too much in the future judging by the pronouncements that are comimg out. The Thais are dreaming if they think they are ever going to corner the high end of the tourist market.

[OlRedEyes]

They don't understand their market, simple. Doubt whether they will anytime soon.

By 'they' I suppose you also mean 'me'

I understand my market fairly well, well enough that the multinationals I deal with specifically want to meet and have me tell them what is going on with tourist arrivals, shopper preference, share of wallet and the like.

Whenever one has to speak about the bigger picture, I would think that speaking about the traits and tendencies of the majority is the norm. To always have to point out that 'this does not apply to EVERYBODY and that there are exceptions' is rather painful and a waste of time. I think most reasonably intelligent people understand that and take it as read.

I don't know you, so I can't say.

However, there is a pointer, though one small pointer is not enough to form an opinion. You immediately respond that you get consulted on ' tourist arrivals, shopper preference, share of wallet and the like. ' It may mean nothing, but it is interesting that you list money-related topics, not service or quality related issues. I assume it falls into the etc. But thats exactly my point.

About building 5-star hotels in a crummy environment. I don't know what the breakdown is in the occupancy percentages as far as they are concerned, business to tourist ratios. I'd imagine the current economic climate must start hurting them there. But really, if I build a 5-star island in a semi-ghetto, and one on the French Riviera, which will attract most upmarket tourists?

These are islands in rubbish. Sorry, but it's true.

I love many things about Thailand and the Thai people, and I hope that in the long term as the culture changes in order for them to be more competitive, integrated and respected in the world, as it must, they don't lose too many of their better values. You still have some things we have lost in the drive for greater econmic growth.

[steveromagnino]

I don't want quality infrastructure when i come to Thailand.

I don't want Gullivers or 5 star hotels or masses of huge concrete shopping malls.

There is a market elsewhere for that and that is well Singapore or lots of European tourist destinations.

I like the outdoor beer bars, the food on the street ,the wrong orders, the chaotic roads ,the mai pen rai attitude etc

That is part of the reason i love Thailand. Take it away and what have you really got.

I feel supremely confident that things are not going to change too much in the future judging by the pronouncements that are comimg out. The Thais are dreaming if they think they are ever going to corner the high end of the tourist market.

There is a market for guys like you, but understand that some might believe that concentrating on this market alone has significant costs to Thai culture, the brand of Thailand and work ethics of certain non Bangkok areas and while there are revenue benefits, it is a niche market rather than the best single mass market to focus on. It may not be the best use of beach front space for instance, to have an 80b beer bar when there are probably many non beer bar type people willing to pay more to sit somewhere nice and perhaps spend more without the requisite connect 4 playing escort to help you drink your bottle of beer. I am completely of the belief that money gained easily gets spent easily, and much of the easily earned money from beer bars ends up being wasted in gambling, drugs and a very small amount gets sent upcountry as a subsidy for people who should be encouraged to do something a lot more productive. It is a crutch built on the laziness and attractiveness of Thai provincial women, and is one of many reasons why currently certain provinces aren't developing (mind you this is an entirely different subject!).

Things will gradually upgrade, but for sure Thailand will never be Paris or New York and thank goodness for that. It has neither the weather, infrastructure, service mind nor a host of other things to do that; I am not aware of too many Thais that 'dream of cornering the high end of the tourist market', in fact I have yet to meet one. But there is the scenery to do it, and some operators manage just fine looking after celebrities and top spenders; so it can be done if certain people remove fingers from bottom and start looking after infrastructure, laws and order.

However, to do a bit better in each segment is what it is about, and I think the Thai beer bar is nice enough and here to stay; but let's try to develop a few other things a bit more imaginative than just that.